Why's it so hard for BCS teams to give WMU football the respect it deserves? (Graham Couch column)

Jessica Hill | Associated PressConnecticut's Scott McCummings (11) tries to avoid Western Michigan defensive end Freddie Bishop on Saturday during the Broncos' 38-31 victory. Bishop and WMU are 3-2 this season with three solid showings against BCS foes.

It was absent a week earlier at Illinois, too, and felt even more brazen then.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t all that prevalent on Labor Day weekend in Ann Arbor, either, considering how the game began.

That is respect — at least publicly — for Western Michigan University’s football program, its players and their abilities
relative to what happened on the field.

The Broncos knocked off UConn 38-31 Saturday, scoring 14 more points on the Huskies than anyone had all season.

WMU quarterback Alex Carder passed for
nearly 500 yards against the previously top-ranked pass defense in the
Big East Conference.

And yet, afterward, good luck finding a
real compliment from UConn directed at Carder or wideout Jordan White,
who caught
a dozen passes for the fourth time this season, or Chleb Ravenell,
who made a SportsCenter Top 10-worthy 41-yard game-winning
touchdown catch.

Instead, almost all of the talk was about what UConn didn’t do.

“When it’s those numbers, usually, it
indicates you weren’t able to get to (the quarterback) enough,” UConn
coach Paul Pasqualoni
said, referencing Carder’s 479 yards and five touchdowns, three of which came in the final quarter.

Ron Zook

At least Pasqualoni managed to call WMU
“a solid team with a good quarterback.” I wonder what it takes to be
considered a
great quarterback on a given day? How many yards does it take? How
many fourth quarter touchdowns? How many completed passes
against a defense that knows you can’t run the football?

A week earlier, Illini coach Ron Zook’s
sudden disregard for WMU was even worse, given that he had spent the
entire week promoting
the importance of avenging a 2008 defeat to the Broncos. When his
nationally ranked team won its fourth consecutive home game,
squeaking by WMU 23-20 on Sept. 24, he acted as if it was tough to
find inspiration against a Mid-American Conference foe.

Zook did say the Broncos were “a good football team,” but his tone was defensive — which is partly the fault of the Illini
media following that couldn’t see past the MAC brand, either.

“I walked in the locker room and it was very somber,” Zook said. “A lot of people may not agree with this, but sometimes,
you have to go through games like that.

“There are a lot of times that teams would have lost that game. I think if you go back and look at the 2007 year (when) we
went to the Rose Bowl, you remember that (Ball State) did exactly the same thing to us.”

To be fair, Illinois running back Troy Pollard did call WMU a “great opponent” that “did some great things. They played hard
and played well. It was pretty tough.”

Perhaps Pollard should handle Zook’s news conferences.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Broncos coach Bill Cubit.

“Illinois goes out there all week long
saying they’re gunning for us and this is a revenge game, and we have a
chance to win
and lose by three and, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘We’re not
on top of our game,’ ” Cubit said. “Well, what’s the reason?
Maybe it’s because the other team played pretty well.

Jessica Hill / Associated PressConnecticut coach Paul Pasqualoni speaks to Tedd Jennings (98) during Saturday's game vs. Western Michigan. The Broncos scored 14 more points than UConn had given up in any other game in a 38-31 win in Hartford.

“I didn’t notice it as much this week,
but it’s always, ‘Well, we didn’t play well,’ but I guarantee you
(UConn) won’t play
another guy like (No.) 14, that can throw the ball as well as he
does,” Cubit continued, referring to Carder. “I know West
Virginia’s got a pretty good one in Geno (Smith), who’s a really
good player, but I don’t know if they’re going to see another
player like (Carder). I don’t know if they’re going to see another
guy like 83 (Jordan White) or a collection of those receivers
that we’ve got.

“But that’s the world. When you go to
those places, you see their football complexes, you see all the money
they throw into
their football program and their stadiums and stuff like that and
there’s a sense over there on the other side like, ‘We can’t
lose to these guys and if we lose to these guys, we’ve got to have
some reason that that happened.’ It’s not that Western
or Toledo or teams in our league are good, it’s just that they
play bad.”

Cubit’s team is 3-2, having scared two BCS clubs — however briefly at Michigan — while beating another.

But, if you listen to the coaches the Broncos have faced or the reporters who cover those teams, you might think Carder, White
and defensive tackle Drew Nowak and Co., are competing on blind luck.

It’s best not to pay attention. The coaches, at least, don’t mean it. It’s all spin.

Privately, Pasqualoni and Zook would happily trade Cubit their quarterbacks and wideouts and perhaps the gumption of their
entire teams.